Tagged With hacking

The past few weeks have been a nightmare for data breaches, so good news: Here's another easily preventable security problem. Adobe's Product Security Incident Response Team accidentally posted the private PGP encryption key — necessary to decrypt encoded messages transmitted to them using their public PGP key — associated with their [email protected] email account this week, Ars Technica reported.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has disclosed that hackers accessed sensitive information from its systems about publicly traded companies. And while the SEC has so far been tight-lipped about what kind of fallout the hack will have, the agency acknowledges that the hackers have probably conducted trades using the information.

Two Equifax executives — Chief Information Officer David Webb and Chief Security Officer Susan Mauldin — are "retiring" in the wake of a security breach that allowed hackers to run off with financial and other private information for an estimated 143 million Americans.

Thanks to intense public outcry in the US, the Federal Trade Commission has confirmed that it is investigating Equifax's vast array of screw-ups surrounding the security breach that compromised the personal data of an estimated 143 million Americans.

Last year, two data scientists from security firm ZeroFOX conducted an experiment to see who was better at getting Twitter users to click on malicious links, humans or an artificial intelligence. The researchers taught an AI to study the behaviour of social network users, and then design and implement its own phishing bait. In tests, the artificial hacker was substantially better than its human competitors, composing and distributing more phishing tweets than humans, and with a substantially better conversion rate.

A New York Times investigation offered some unnerving news on Friday. Not only was the hacking of electoral systems during last year's US election "more extensive than previously disclosed," the paper reports, multiple sources say that nobody's really examining the the attacks on a state or local level. The reasons why are as complex as they are alarming.

The US Food and Drug Administration announced today that 465,000 pacemakers have a security vulnerability that could be exploited to make the device operate too quickly or deplete its batteries, and these devices need firmware updates to keep them from getting hacked.

Cable giant HBO's very embarrassing 2017 has continued to get more embarrassing. Hacker squad OurMine Security Group compromised Game of Thrones' Twitter account, posting a message to its 6 million plus followers saying "Hi, OurMine are here, we are just testing your security."

Bored hackers who aren't getting paid tend to get restless. And so yesterday, the cyber thieves behind the recent HBO breach leaked several unreleased episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which was scheduled to return in October after six years off the air. HBO, understandably, seems annoyed.

Episode 5 of the penultimate season of Game of Thrones will air this week. As with episode four, an outline of the script has been circulating online in what seems to be the latest leak from the huge HBO hack. And suddenly, it seems like the "cyber incident" that some people — including this blogger — thought would be catastrophic is just a big, bad empty threat.

We've all been forced to do it: Create a password with at least so many characters, so many numbers, so many special characters, and maybe an uppercase letter. Guess what? The guy who invented these standards nearly 15 years ago now admits that they're basically useless. He is also very sorry.

The hackers behind a massive intrusion into HBO systems have released a month's worth of a senior HBO executive's emails, dumping a "publicly accessible link to a cache of internal documents" which also included the script to yet another upcoming episode of Game of Thrones, Hollywood Reporter wrote today.

Season seven, episode four of Game of Thrones is now in the wild. The leaked video comes less than a week after HBO admitted that its servers had been hacked and a large quantity of data had been stolen. We already knew that a script — or, more specifically, an outline of a script — of episode four was part of the hack. Now, in a reportedly unrelated incident, it seems the Game of Thrones episode itself has been leaked.

Famed white hat hacker Marcus Hutchins — better known as "MalwareTech" — was arrested by the FBI yesterday while trying to fly home to the United Kingdom from Las Vegas. The 22-year-old security researcher gained mainstream fame earlier this year as the guy who stopped the destructive WannaCry ransomware from spreading, and had been partying with friends near the Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences before his arrest. Now, he faces serious federal charges for allegedly creating the Kronos banking trojan. But he's supposed to be the good guy!

Well, this isn't terribly surprising. According to the latest dispatch from Variety, the hackers who broke into HBO's servers and stole 1.5 terabytes of data, including at least one Game of Thrones script, also stole employee data. More specifically, the hackers made off with "thousands of Home Box Office (HBO) internal company documents". That's bad.

A threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant has been hacked and the attackers are claiming to have lurked on his computer for a year, collecting his login credentials for various sites and tracking his location.